Multi-service Single Tenant 5G Fronthaul Resource Orchestration Framework based on Network Slicing.

With the evolution of 5G networks towards fully software, Network Slicing (NS) has emerged as a new paradigm to create a set of customised logical network instances on top of the same physical infrastructure. Telecom operators provide "slices" of their networks to different industries (e.g., automotive, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and eHealth), targeting to increase the resource utilization and Return on Investment (ROI). However, as the service demand increases, slice management becomes particularly complex, especially in the Radio Access Network (RAN) section, since virtualized infrastructures are significantly more complex to manage compared to physical networks. In this paper, a novel 5G New Radio (5G NR) NS management framework is presented, which targets to define the optimal NS parameterization for the entire Fronthaul (FH) 5G network. Our solution is divided into three phases: i) definition of the 5G Downlink Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (DL-HARQ) parameters (K0, K1), ii) the dynamic (inter-slice) partitioning of the radio resources among the slices, inline with the Service Level Agreement (SLA), and, iii) an intra-slice scheduling algorithm for the user prioritization, given real-time user's traffic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) analysis. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed solution is the first attempt of a real-time NS management framework for the complete FH section, involving frame granularity service customization.